How to determine and manage your hotel’s brand identity?

Have you ever imagined your property’s brand as a human? If you can’t visualize a person in your mind when you think about it, well, your brand might be lacking personality. A brand lacking personality will probably not have an identity and image either.

Most of the time, brand personality is considered to be a synonym of brand identity. However, the two sharply differ from each other. Brand identity generally has to do with sources that help you to determine the intentions and goals of a brand. Your brand’s vision, mission and image are covered by the definition of brand identity.

As for brand personality, you can take it as people’s personality. A brand personality is represented in the way it is perceived by the consumer, i.e. if it is piquant, reliable, entertaining, fun, formal, solemn, etc. How to build that so-called personality?

Brand identity activities with the property staff

To determine your brand personality and develop a bunch of strategies, particularly including the marketing activities, you and your property staff may get started with an introductory walkthrough.

First of all, write down a list of phrases you believe depict your hotel like “city hotel”, “best for business travels”, “cost-effective & high quality accommodation”. You’d better keep this list in 10 to 20 phrases. Then ask those working for you to create their own list. Encourage them to provide independent and honest responses. If you think necessary, you may even collect anonymous responses. Remember that the main purpose is to achieve the healthiest and most objective answers. Once you ensure that everyone has participated, scrutinize all the sentences.

The purpose of this work is to understand whether your team shares the same feelings, thoughts and vision for your hotel. Don’t expect all the sentences to be similar. If there are dramatic differences between your staff’s thoughts & feelings and yours, you will figure out the problem to be eliminated. If the entire team shares the same kind of feelings and thoughts, you can have innumerous benefits. One primary benefit is to enable your team to adopt the correct communication with your guests through their gestures and words.

What underpins all these is brand identity for sure. Your brand identity explains who you are, what you do and why you do so. From international organizations to family corporations, all brands need to have a brand identity. And it is the responsibility of all the employees to improve, transfer, manage and protect that identity.

The brand management process

Managing your property’s brand is not as difficult as you imagine. The easiest way to manage this process is to be clear, open and consistent. For instance, if you define your hotel as “a waterfront perfect hotel for families, boasting all extraordinarily comfortable rooms”, you must communicate this message to your target audience in every possible way. You need to communicate the same message again and again at any platform where you contact your guests, from your website to OTAs, from your phone welcome messages to reception, brochures as well as attitudes and gestures. This way, your brand identity will be built in time and your guests might have a specific brand perception as to your hotel.

After building your brand personality and identity on which you can build all your marketing strategy, particularly including your advertising activities.

HotelRunner does not only help you carry your property to the digital world. It also keeps providing different kinds of information on everything about property management. If you also want to make a difference as a business in the digital environment and share your experienced hotel management with your target audience, you can benefit from expert insight and services of HotelRunner. If you would like to, create your HotelRunner account for free now and start earning with online sales immediately.

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